At the Houston astrodome, thousands of evacuees are living in a city of cots and cafeteria lines, struggling to forget the horrors of what they saw in New Orleans and trying to figure out how they’re going to support themselves when they leave. This place has the population of a small suburb and an unemployment rate near 100 percent.
Michael Greeley and his wife Dominique struggled to support their three children even before the storm hit.
“I basically have to be able to support my family and my three kids by me getting a job,” says Michael Greely. “It would be a great thing to just start over.”
And it is Larry Temple’s job to try to help them. He is the executive director of the Texas state agency responsible for finding work for the refugees.
“It’s a little taxing in getting all the resources put together and getting all the dots together. But we’re getting there,” says Temple.
This has been described as an employment agencies version of speed dating. Evacuees arrive in a tent, sit down across from job counselors or potential employers. They talk for a few minutes, and if they find a job that’s a good fit they take it and go.
Hundreds have boarded buses for other states that have agreed to supply not only jobs but housing. People who have just been through a traumatic life change, are making more life-changing decisions.
California car dealer Joe Cardinale was so struck by the hurricane pictures he’s seen on television that he jumped on his jet and flew to Houston to help, offering to move as many as 15 families to either Arizona or California to work at one of his dealerships.
“We decided we couldn’t sit on the sidelines, we needed to help,” he says.
But as he talked to the applicants in the job tent— most of them unskilled laborers— he began to realize how huge responsibility he’d taken on.
Still, he sees not only need, but tremendous desire in people like Michael Greely who says he’s ready to move far from his roots in New Orleans.
Michael says he doesn’t want to go back. “I just want to start over in a state that doesn’t have hurricanes. I won’t go through that ever again.”
The Greeleys will never have the life they had before. They are hoping for a better one.
The Greelys have booked their flights, they leave Thursday for Arizona. Larry Temple's agency has posted more than 10,000 job openings so far, and registered more than 20-thousand new job-seekers.
